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The Cresset, a journal of commentary on literature, the arts, and public affairs, explores ideas and trends in contemporary culture from a perspective grounded in the Lutheran tradition of scholarship, freedom, and faith while informed by the wisdom of the broader Christian community.

A Publication of:

For
people coming to Luci Shaw’s poetry for the first time, Sea Glass: New &
Selected Poems will serve as a useful gateway into this prolific poet’s work.
For those familiar with Luci Shaw’s lifetime of writing—not only her fourteen
poetry collections, but also many books of nonfiction, co-authored books with
Madeleine L’Engle, edited anthologies, and more—the thirty-eight new poems in
her fifteenth poetry collection strike the balance that most of us hope to find
in a beloved musician’s new album: it’s recognizably related to the work that’s
come before, but it doesn’t feel like simply more of the same. Shaw finds new
ways to explore unexpected beauty in this broken world.

The collection’s title, Sea Glass, refers to broken glass
that has been transformed by its time in salt water, resulting in bits of
smooth, frosted glass that wash up on the shore and delight collectors. In the
poem “Witnessing,” Shaw explores the symbolic possibilities of this glass:

Gems known as Mermaid Tears

plucked from what used to be a Ft.
Bragg dump—

the broken glass worn by waves to
amber, cobalt blue and

jade. Evidence everywhere.
Communities of witness.

Memory a hoarder, always gathering
clues.

In a similar move of gathering small details as evidence,
Shaw’s poem “The Generosity” concludes, “And today, a raven feather on / the
sidewalk and wings in the sky, / memos from heaven everywhere.” Throughout
these new poems, there is indeed a sense of piecing together clues from memory
and observation, and these clues always seem to point to God.

It’s not only the beautiful clues that point Shaw to God, but
also the uncomfortable, less lovely details of life. In “Echocardiogram,”
Shaw’s imagery and diction allow readers to experience the discomfort of the
medical procedure:

I am laid on a table, half-naked and uneasy,
a supplicant for truth. Tethered in place withelectrodes, flipped on my side, my left breast
smeared with cool gel, my torso penetrated by
a seeing eye at the end of an intelligent probe.

Yet even in this “uneasy” and “tethered” state, the speaker
hears the “harsh gulps” of her physical heart and moves into questions about
God: “What of my other heart, prone to / fibrillations of impatience or
inconstancy? What kind of / surgery do I pray for? In what operating theater? /
What cardiologist God, wearing scrubs?” With lines like this, Shaw joins poets
like William Blake—whose poem “The Tyger” depicts God forging a fierce animal
with fire, hammer, and anvil—in exploring the nature of God by blending
theological questions with surprising images.

Shaw also joins Blake in using animals as a parallel for
humans and as a potential key to understanding ourselves. In “What to Sing,”
the speaker juxtaposes herself waiting on a bench with a bird on a branch above
“singing exactly what / my heart had heard. // She sang, It’s simple, / Just
open your throat. / The air will carry it.” In “Robin in the Late Afternoon,”
the speaker is beckoned like a worm from the ground by a robin’s song and finds
“fresh hopefulness” in the sound. In “Water,” the speaker imagines herself
floating after a swim, “making / my own shape in the surface that bears me / on
its body like an insect.” Another poem, “Environmental Art,” seems to offer an
explanation for all of these human-animal connections: “My surroundings answer
my scrutiny, glance / back, see in me a mirror, // as if we are partners in
dialog about what / to make of the world.” Shaw often brings us into the peace
of finding ourselves mirrored in the rest of God’s creation.

One of Shaw’s new poems, however, offers a human-animal
connection that makes me intensely uncomfortable. In “Veterans,” the speaker
stands beside her grandchildren and observes a squirrel, which she calls “our
young neighbor,” using a bird feeder. She describes the squirrel’s “lopped off”
tail, missing toe nails, and missing left paw, and she speculates about “his
history—Trap? / Cat attack? Pellet gun? Whatever, amputation / hasn’t slowed
him one bit.” The squirrel polishes off the seeds and comes back the following
day. This lengthy stanza is followed by a much shorter stanza:

Today at church we met a homeless
army vet, limping

and hungry. The good
breakfast he got sent him on his way,

grateful for nutrients as
welcome as bird seed.

We hope he comes back for
more.

What is it about this juxtaposition of injured squirrel and
injured man that makes me so uncomfortable as a reader? Is it that the speaker
is comparing someone other than herself to an animal? Is it the potential de-humanizing
of a person who is homeless and/or disabled? Is it the way this man is left out
of the “we” of the church community in that final line? I’m still wrestling
with this poem’s implications and with my own complicity as one of the “we.”

I also found myself usefully uncomfortable with the poem
“Total Recall,” which describes one man’s reality of being able to remember
everything, “so that with a mere twitch of neurons / he could deliver every
detail // into the present.” The poem delights me with the procession of
details that follows, from “the belch and / roar of a London bus” to “A
chestnut // freshly brought forth from its / spiky green shell.” Then comes the
turn: this man finds his memory intolerable. The speaker asks, “Who / would lust
for the clutter // of all those marching minutes, / the trivia of an infinite
number/ of days?” This leads to the final moment, less shocking than E. A.
Robinson’s “Richard Cory” perhaps, but startling nonetheless: “In the end the
smothered mind / took the body with it, and the thick / air around him
clarified suddenly.” This poem is beautifully written, and sympathizing with
another human’s experience is always valuable. At the same time, I feel
uncomfortable with my position as reader/voyeur of what I interpret as a
suicide, and that leaves me thinking and questioning myself long after I’ve
read the poem.

While Shaw’s new poems focus on the beauty of broken things
and broken people, they also contain a good deal of humor. There’s a
language-level playfulness that comes out in poems like “Fugitive,” in which
the speaker tries to recall a word that she can’t quite remember, and “The Life
of I,” which is an ode to the letter “I” that also alludes to God as “I am.”
Shaw also occasionally reveals an irreverent sense of humor. In “Peeling the
Onion,” the speaker says, “your sharp essence clings to my hands like / a
reputation.” In “Witnessing,” the speaker describes her office décor from
around the world: “a twining of dried kelp, / seed pods intact, hangs tastefully.
If asked I’ll tell you / it’s my gastric and reproductive system, with
ovaries.” The title of the poem “Jesus Checks in for the Flight Home” is
humorous, but it moves between humor and darker imagery that is fitting for its
Holy Week setting: “One by one we go through the scanner. Jesus stands firm, /
lifts, spreads his arms over his head in the posture / I recognize from
centuries of sacred art. / The machine strips him naked as a shorn lamb. […]
His body is declared flawless but for some nail holes…” Throughout these new
poems, Shaw captures so well how humor can creep into unexpected situations,
and her often playful perspective makes these new poems a joy to read.

This wonderful blend of playfulness with profundity is not
limited to Shaw’s new poems, as longtime readers of her work will know. One of
my all-time favorite poems from her selected work is “No, I’m Not Hildegarde”
from Harvesting Fog. The poem opens, “I’m merely a floater in the eye of
God...” This title and first line make me smile every time I read them, but
that opening image also functions as a powerful reminder of how small each of
us is compared to the vastness of God (a simultaneously terrifying and
comforting thought) and how small many people feel, along with the poem’s speaker,
because we are not Hildegarde, St. Catherine, or some other seemingly more
significant person. Yet even in the midst of self-deprecation, there is a
pervasive sense of God’s love.

When I was sitting beside a dying relative in the ICU a few
months ago, this was the book I carried with me to the hospital every day. I
found these poems to be thought provoking, comforting, and uplifting during one
of the darkest times of my life. I am grateful for Luci Shaw’s work. A

Katie Manning is the founding editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review and
an associate professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San
Diego. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks. Her first full-length poetry
collection, Tasty Other, won the 2016 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award.
She’s online at www.katiemanningpoet.com.